I find Prototype.js to be really depressing, and one of the most ironically named libraries ever. The whole point of it is to bludgeon Class-based bullshit into the only pure Prototype-based language anyone uses. It's named after the concept it's designed explicitly to stamp out!
I always wondered about that. I had assumed I must be misunderstanding either what Prototype.js did or why I was named Prototype.js and not "Class.js". Apparently I was not misunderstanding.
It's sad to see people take a cool feature and undermine it to try to make it act like less useful but familiar feature. I guess it would be like someone writing a macro library for C++ that converts all exceptions to C-style error code returns.
Absolutely, and through its use in the games industry it's easily the second-most popular Prototypical language in use -- but the ECMAScript languages are orders of magnitude more popular.
Abstracting behaviour out so that it can be shared by differing objects is a useful thing to be able to do. Putting shared behaviour (and maybe also assertions as to the structure of 'instances') in another object and calling it a 'class' is one way to achieve that -- but not the only way.
If you liked this I would recommend reading "The Treaty of Orlando" (DOI 10.1.1.55.482) and also anything you can get your hands on about a small forgotten language by Antero Taivalsaari called "Kevo".
Kevo was a prototype based OO language without any delegation or 'parent' slots. Every object was self-contained and carried around within it all of the functionality it needed. Functionality was shared by copying, and shared behaviour was not reified into a separate object (whether called a 'class' or not)
Seconded. I actually discovered Io specifically due to the prototypes vs. classes issue. After running into the limits of class based design while working on a moderately large codebase for a commercial program, I began to question what it would mean, philosophically, for a language to have objects but no inheritance (and by extension no classes), and that led me to finding Io.
